The Character of English Poetry – 1 51motives and never succeeded in bringing about between them a
conciliation and fusion. Therefore its form has suffered; it has
had indeed no native and characteristic principle of form which
would be, through all changes, the outward reflection of a clear
self-recognising spirit.
The poetry of a nation is only one side of its self-expression
and its characteristics may be best understood if we look at it in
relation to the whole mental and dynamic effort of the people.
If we so look at the general contribution of the English nation to
human life and culture, the eye is arrested by some remarkable
lacunae. These are especially profound in the arts: English music
is a zero, English sculpture an unfilled void, English architecture
only a little better;^1 English painting, illustrated by a few great
names, has been neither a great artistic tradition nor a powerful
cultural force and merits only a casual mention by the side of
the rich achievement of Italy, Spain, France, Holland, Belgium.
When we come to the field of thought we get a mixed impression
like that of great mountain eminences towering out of a very
low and flat plain. We find great individual philosophers, but no
great philosophical tradition, two or three remarkable thinkers,
but no high fame for thinking, a great multitude of the most
famous names in science, but no national scientific culture. Still
in these fields there has been remarkable accomplishment and
the influence on European thought has been frequently consid-
erable and sometimes capital. But when finally we turn to the
business of practical life, there is an unqualified preeminence: in
mechanical science and invention, in politics, in commerce and
industry, in colonisation, travel, exploration, in the domination
of earth and the exploitation of its riches England has been till
late largely, sometimes entirely the world’s leader, the creator of
its forms and the shaper of its motives.
This peculiar distribution of the national capacities finds its
root in certain racial characteristics. We have first the dominant
Anglo-Saxon strain quickened, lightened and given force, power
(^1) Outside the Gothic, and even there thereis not the continental magnificence of the
past’s riches.